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The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

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Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#41

Post by tdees40 »

ferdek wrote: post #36
kaashif wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand - to sell short you already need to borrow securities, can you actually take loans against a short position that becomes worth something? That's interesting.

You can Fail-to-deliver and never locate the stock that you are supposed to borrow. Or you can short ETF with this specific company in basket while going long on anything else in this ETF. Everything you own, even your own debt, can be used as a collateral by creating and selling swaps.

I work in markets. No, you cannot just fail to deliver. I'm also not sure how the ETF thing would work. If it's 1% of the ETF you're going to hedge out the position using a giant notional. It doesn't work.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#42

Post by pigtailgirl »

quags wrote: post #25
pigtailgirl wrote: post #16

-- is it true the digital ocean support also bad now?? - who has good support? --

Serious question. What support would digital ocean , an unmanaged vps provider , really need to offer besides keeping their network, control panel and kvm nodes up? Assuming their infra is running normally which is a bare minimum there should be no reason to contact support.

-- they have large product set these days --

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#43

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tmountain wrote: post #39

I visited them during the peak of their success and they had a giant stainless steel slide in the middle of their facility that had been given to them by the German government. It was steep and twisty, and I inquired about the liability of having it. With a grin, a staff member told me that several employees had broken bones using the slide and that there was an active lawsuit in progress with a former employee due t…

Would a "use this slide at your own risk" sign be enough to prevent any lawsuits?

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#44

Post by dminvs »

dizhn wrote: post #33
opsunit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They bought and then shuttered Slicehost in an attempt to occupy that market segment.

DataPipe (another company where tech support was the #1 priority) was also acquired by Rackspace. However I don't know if it was acquired by the original owners or the current org.

That deal was announced in September 2017 and closed in November, so Rackspace was already in the clutches of Apollo by then.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#45

Post by helsinkiandrew »

tmountain wrote: post #39

I visited them during the peak of their success and they had a giant stainless steel slide in the middle of their facility that had been given to them by the German government. It was steep and twisty, and I inquired about the liability of having it. With a grin, a staff member told me that several employees had broken bones using the slide and that there was an active lawsuit in progress with a former employee due t…

> that had been given to them by the German government

Really? that does sounds unlikely to me. Are you sure they didn't say "We got it from Germany" meaning it was imported from Germany rather than given to them by the German government?

[edit] infact I wonder if the slide wasn't by German artist Carsten Höller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carsten_H%C3%B6ller#Slides

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#48

Post by heurisko »

skilled wrote: post #20

Rackspace had such a strong reputation during the 2000s, particularly for dedicated servers. I wonder if anyone in their exec team ever brought up the fact that they got their ass kicked by DigitalOcean, and similar platforms when it comes to affordable and simple hosting.

I feel AWS ate Rackspace's lunch.

Rackspace were never part of the affordable hosting segment.

I think DigitalOcean ate the shared PHP hosters' lunch.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#49

Post by ferdek »

tdees40 wrote: post #41
ferdek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can Fail-to-deliver and never locate the stock that you are supposed to borrow. Or you can short ETF with this specific company in basket while going long on anything else in this ETF. Everything you own, even your own debt, can be used as a collateral by creating and selling swaps.

I work in markets. No, you cannot just fail to deliver. I'm also not sure how the ETF thing would work. If it's 1% of the ETF you're going to hedge out the position using a giant notional. It doesn't work.

Official SEC document regarding regulation SHO describes both illegal and legal cases when you can "just" fail to deliver [0]. Market makers which also happen to have hedge-fund branches are having the most flexibility in this.

[0] https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/regsho.htm

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#50

Post by Hippocrates »

My company used Rackspace back in 2013. It was my first gig where I was "managing servers" and "deploying to production". The rest of the team was as inexperienced as I was.

We paid extra for the support services that entitled us to unlimited 24/7 human support. Whenever I was stuck on an issue with deploying, scaling, crashing etc. my boss would say "try calling support." Initially you'd get a first-line operator but I learned quickly to "escalate to a sysadmin".

The sysadmin was eager to help and would log into your VPS and do anything you'd ask, plus advise and implement on stuff they thought you'd need! Debug your running app and code? Sure. Fix broken packages or get something to compile? Of course. Custom scaling and deployment scripts in bash? Gladly. Some reps were more helpful than others and I got to know them on a first-name basis.

In hindsight it seems totally absurd to have a phone support running bash on our VPS but it was super helpful at the time. I learned a lot and they saved my bacon a few times. I can only imagine the liability issues.

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